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- [00:00]
Tristan Hughes
Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free, get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary All About Petra and the Nabateans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:25]
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- [00:56]
Tristan Hughes
125,000 podcasts trust Acast to connect them with their audience. Your brand can speak to your perfect audience too, by advertising with acast, we're home to the biggest names in podcasting, reaching millions of engaged listeners who can only be accessed through acast. From true crime to comedy finance to fitness, your next customer's favorite podcast is an ACAST show. Your audience is already here. Speak to them with Acast. Visit go.acast.com to get started today. Druids when someone mentions the word, he might think of old men in white robes wearing mistletoe underneath an oak tree with a sickle. These forest loving priests who are also closely connected today to prehistoric sites like Stonehenge and the winter solstice. And indeed, Druids. They have a long history, first mentioned more than 2,000 years ago by Roman statesmen and writers such as Cicero and Julius Caesar, when they were talking about what were, in their eyes, uncivilized barbarian societies that lived in Northwest Europe, think people like the Celts. So who were the ancient Druids? What do the sources say about them? Why is it so difficult to recognize Druids in surviving archaeology? Did they practice human sacrifice? And how have Druids evolved and transformed over the centuries and millennia to remain so significant down to the present day? From winter solstices to the figure of panoramics in the brilliant comic series Asterix and Obelix, it's the Ancients on History hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And today, to align with the winter solstice of 2024, we're exploring the story of the Druids. Both the mysterious Druids of Britain and France mentioned by Roman writers, but also their legacy and evolution down to the present day. Now, to talk through all of this, our guest is the wonderful professor Ronald Hutton from the University of Bristol. Now, Ronald, he is a regular on the History Hits Network, having featured on Not Just the Tudors, Betwixt the Sheets and After Dark. This is his first time on the Ancients, but boy, was he brilliant. Sit back and relax as Ronald and I explore the story of the Druids. Ronald, it is a pleasure. It is great to have you on the podcast today.
- [03:35]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It's great to be here.
- [03:37]
Tristan Hughes
Now, let's get straight into it. The Druids. First off, who were the Druids?
- [03:42]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Ronald we can say with perfect confidence that the Druids were the main experts in religion, magic and all modes of spirituality for the peoples of Northwestern Europe at the time they emerge into history a couple of thousand years ago. And that's all we can say about them, with absolute confidence.
- [04:04]
Tristan Hughes
Because this is quite a topic, isn't it, Ronald? It's one that Shroud is doing quite a lot of mystery and, and the source material that we have for the Druids in ancient history some 2000 years ago. I mean, what types do we have?
- [04:17]
Professor Ronald Hutton
We have quite a lot of comments by people who didn't have Druids. We have absolutely nothing from the Druids themselves. They never committed anything to writing, or if they did, none of it survived. We actually have two different bodies of testimony instead. One is from Greek and Roman writers, some of whom lived at the time of Druids, but only one of whom might actually have met them. And we have stories about Druids from the medieval Christian Irish, but writing at a time long after Druids had ceased to exist. So the problem with the first lot is that most of them are hostile. They're serving the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire depended on having an empire by pleading that they conquered people for their own good, to civilize them. And they accused the Druids, most of them, of being the worst sort of barbaric priest, founded on fear, ignorance, tyranny with a particularly tacky sideline, and human sacrifice. And the problem with the Irish is of course, that they were writing long after Druids ceased to exist, even though they were in their own people, and again provided a range of views, some deeply Christian and hostile, others favorable. But we have no idea which of these are fantasies they may all be.
- [05:49]
Tristan Hughes
It's interesting you say that. I mean, if we focus first on those Greek and Roman sources. Ronald. So as you Say so there's a clear bias in the writing, is there to when they are talking about Druids in an area that they're coming into contact with, they've already got in that mind this idea that they are civilized people, they are civilizations, and Druids being so different to them, do they almost kind of become an epitome of barbarian life in their eyes in the areas that they're going into?
- [06:18]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Yeah, that's absolutely right. They don't become an epitome of barbarian life in general because the Romans have been epitomizing barbarians for centuries beforehand. And the Romans also epitomize, as savages, people within their own society whom they don't like. For example, they accuse the Jews and the Christians who weren't conformed to their religion of sexual malpractices and human sacrifice. This common theme that you pin human sacrifice on people you don't like is universally Roman. The double standard till recently is because there are plenty of Christians and Druids around in the modern world and they've preserved writings that prove the hostile Romans wrong. We don't believe the Romans who accused them of these horrors, but the Druids have left nobody to speak for them. So a lot of people have accepted what the Romans say about them on face value, which is a bit dangerous, considering the bigger picture.
- [07:24]
Tristan Hughes
I think you're absolutely right. And you can absolutely look at that in other parts of the Mediterranean world too, where you only have the Greek and Roman sources in regards to the literature for that time. I mean, Ronald, I must also ask, you mentioned right at the start, so northwestern Europe, so back 2,000 years ago, whereabouts geographically are we talking about with northwestern Europe and where the Druids lived.
- [07:47]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Specifically, they're identified by ancient and medieval writers in what's now France and Belgium and what's now the British Isles.
- [07:59]
Tristan Hughes
And it's interesting there. So in those areas, if we have sources talking about them, literary sources, what about archaeology? Ronald, because this is something we haven't even talked about yet. How difficult is archaeology? I mean, is it possible to use archaeology to try and identify Druids?
- [08:16]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It's certainly possible to use archaeology to identify Druids. And so far it's got everywhere or nowhere, depending on how you view the evidence. Because we have enormous quantities of material evidence of the religious lives of the Iron Age peoples who had Druids. What we've not got so far is one single scrap of it which can be certainly identified with Druids. In other words, the lack of writing means we don't have this belonged to Titanax the Druid written upon a piece of equipment. And we don't even have particular artifacts from places and exact sites that the Romans identified as Druidic because the Romans were not that specific. So you have your choices on a spectrum on which a lot of different scholars sit of either saying everything you find that refers to Northwestern European I age religion must be Druidic or to say that none of it can be associated. And since there's absolutely no agreement on this, I'm not sure how far we're ever going to get anywhere with it unless we come across this all important.
- [09:37]
Tristan Hughes
Inscriptional evidence, if only one day. I mean, because, I mean, just to bring up a couple of examples, I was at Colchester Castle Museum a year or so ago, Ronald, and saw the doctor's grave that also used association with Druids and, and, and also items like the Cavernham crown. So those items are out there, but as you've mentioned there. So it's very much because there's no inscription saying this was owned by a Druid, it's very much up for debate whether they were possessed by Druids.
- [10:06]
Professor Ronald Hutton
That's exactly right. The equipment found in the grave at Colchester is definitely that of the doctor. These are medical instruments. If Druids were experts in medicine as well as spirituality, then it could be a Druid's grave as well, but it might not be. There are various metal crowns, quite ornate, found in places like Deal and elsewhere, Deal in Kent, which have been claimed to be those of Druids. They could be. They could also be those of chieftains. So you see where I'm going here, we're on thin ice wherever we tread.
- [10:44]
Tristan Hughes
Absolutely. Indeed. Well, let's focus on the Roman sources first of all and let's kind of go through them, Ronald, and how they talk about Druids. What's some of our earliest Roman sources that start mentioning Druids?
- [10:57]
Professor Ronald Hutton
The earliest of all is the big one, the one that we rely on most. And it's Julius Caesar who is not only one of the best known Roman generals and politicians, but also one of the best known Roman authors. A hundred years of English schoolchildren studying classics had to make their way through Caesar's prosecution as part of their education. So he's a familiar and beloved figure to modern Brits or at least those who went through a traditional Victorian style education. But here's the problem that Caesar only mentions Druids once in his long and detailed account of his conquest of Gaul, which is now France and Belgium, which is definitely a place that hand druids. And the passage concerned is a standalone. It isn't in Caesar's usual style and it actually contradicts some of what he says in the rest of his book. Now we know the book, which is his account of the Gallic War was unfinished when Caesar died and it was finished some years later by another author. And so we aren't sure whether this passage is Caesar's work or it was stuck in by the other author because he felt that the narrative needed breaking up at that point, the reader needed a stock taking rest in order to hear about the society of the Gauls in general. If Caesar giving the testimony he was there, he'd have seen it. It's really important. If it's not Caesar given the testimony, then it's lifted from a different source, which may be much less reliable. And actually, even if it's Caesar, he's not that reliable himself because he's a spin doctor politician. And his contemporaries noted that you couldn't rely on a thing he said because it was all propaganda.
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Tristan Hughes
He was a master of pr, wasn't he, Ronald?
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Professor Ronald Hutton
Yes, he really was. He was a master of everything except ultimately survival.
- [13:06]
Tristan Hughes
And so what does it say in the Gallic wars in that mention of the Druids? Whether it's written by Caesar or this other writer, I believe it's Hirtius, might have got the name wrong there, who continues the account after Caesar dies. What does it say about the Druids in Gaul?
- [13:21]
Professor Ronald Hutton
You're right about the writer.
- [13:23]
Tristan Hughes
Brilliant.
- [13:24]
Professor Ronald Hutton
The account is what you might call a balanced one in that it depicts the Druids as both admirable and scary. It depicts them as admirable in being very learned, especially in the movements, the stars and the nature of the earth. Highly organized in that they meet from all over Gaul with a common agenda or a common assembly right in the center of the country. So they're international in terms of the tribes and they exert enormous authority over the tribes, including deciding whether they should fight wars or not. But on the other hand, unlike decent Romans, they do commit human sacrifice, although Caesar says that they do so only in emergencies and they tend to sacrifice condemned criminals, although he puts in a sting by saying if none of these are available, then they'll find anybody who's expendable. Again, we have no idea how reliable this is, because what he's doing is showing the Druids to be a formidable force, not a force for good, which justifies the Roman takeover of the area.
- [14:41]
Tristan Hughes
I'd like to pick up on a couple of points there, Ronald. I mean, first of all, sometimes, you know, nowadays especially we divide the religious world from the political world of today, and we see them as two separate spheres. But is the druids, is that a great example at least how they're described in this account? How the druids, their power does not just center around that religious part of life, how the religious and the political, like everyday running of a community in these areas, they were very much intermixed together. So they had huge importance in the whole running, in the deciding of war and peace and daily life and religious life.
- [15:19]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Well, that's what this passage says. But when you look at the rest of Caesar's really detailed account of the fighting, the druids are not there. They're completely invisible, whereas they should be taking crucial military and political decisions, and they're not. There's a guy mentioned by Caesar who is a tribal chief, a secular leader, and he's also mentioned by another politician, very famous one of Caesar's time, called Cicero. And Cicero mentions that this Gallic chieftain comes to Rome and he has long chats with him and he's a druid, but in Caesar's account, he's not a druid, he's a regular tribal chief. And according to this standalone account of druids in Caesar's work, druids are not regular tribal chiefs. So we have a mess here. What should have been and looks like at first sight, really clear, helpful eyewitness testimony turns out maybe to be nothing of the kind.
- [16:28]
Tristan Hughes
I say this is all theory now, Ronald, but it's interesting you also brought up Cicero there, that great orator who you always think about being stationed in Rome or in Italy. Do you think the word druid kind of filters down into the center of the Roman Empire almost as part of the propaganda for Gaul, but as you say for people actually on there, the, you know, you don't actually see them as much on the front ranks in the political decision making. It's interesting that Cicero knows of the word druids back in Italy.
- [16:54]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Yes, and thereafter the druids become bogeymen to the Romans. As each generation of Roman writers comes in, they make druids nastier. So by the time you get to 100, 150 years after Caesar's time, by which time druids have disappeared from the Roman provinces of the Empire, they are accused of all manner of worse things like cannibalism. And now human sacrifice has not become a rare event like it was in the account in seasons. It's actually central to their type of religion. So they get demonized more and more as they disappear, until by the time they're gone, they are at their worst. And then there's another change as you go. Later in the Roman Empire, and the propaganda of the evil druid is no longer needed. Druids reappear, but this time they're mostly female and they're prophetesses. Usually they're to prophesy that some oik in a pub is going to become an emperor, and he always does later. So they're ladies with the second sight, like many a spae wife in Norse and in Highland Scots tradition. Later. Now, the solution to all this could be that druid is a word, it's a term. And we wouldn't make a fuss about them if the Romans had simply used the Roman term for priest or magician or soothsayer for them. But they used this standalone, unique technical term, and it seems to be just the regular word in Celtic languages, those of the peoples who had druids for anybody with an expertise in religion, magic or spirituality. So at one end of the spectrum, you have Caesar's college of super sages who get together and basically run the culture to these alewives and wandering prophetesses who turn up in later Roman literature. And they're all druids because they all have a relationship with magic or with religion. When you look at the medieval Irish literature, overwhelmingly a druid is anybody who works magic, not dealing with religion. It's magic. And indeed, the word for magic in medieval Irish, dreedacht or dreidecht, there are two versions, just means druidcraft.
- [19:31]
Tristan Hughes
That's like another part of the whole story of the druids, isn't it, Ronald? It's just the word druid and how it has evolved over the many centuries. It's almost, I guess, maybe like the word Celtic or elsewhere. I'm sure this is what you've done as well. You can study the evolution of druids and who is associated with that word druid over centuries and millennia and be fascinated with how that changes too.
- [19:54]
Professor Ronald Hutton
You're spot on, Tristan. Europeans, later Europeans, don't always need druids. Medieval Europeans didn't need them at all, apart from the medieval Irish who made them heroic national figures or demonic national figures. They suddenly come back into the frame in the 16th century when northern Europeans start forming nation states with their particular histories and traditions. And the whole thing about being Northern European is if you look back into the remote past, the very first Charismatic figures you encounter are the Druids. And so they can do a lot of work for you. If you're a Christian and emphasize the religious side, they're demonic figures. But if you're a nationalist looking for your roots, they can be heroic figures. And there's a kind of domino effect. The Germans start this, the French then follow, Scots follow, and last of all, the English come in but 100 years after the others. But once the English invent Britain, in other words, they conquer Ireland and they unite with Scotland and Wales, there is a need for a common past for the new British superstate. Most of the national heroes of the component peoples have become heroes by killing other component peoples of the new British state. So William Wallace, Robert Bruce killed the English, King Arthur kills the English. Owen Glyndwer and Llewelyn Griffith of Wales kill the English, and the Irish heroes like Finn McCool kill everybody else. And so you have a desperate need for bonding figures. The great common denominator is the Druids, because they're behind everybody there and can be claimed by everybody. They become cement holding together a new national history. Right.
- [22:00]
Tristan Hughes
They become the cement. I mean, before I bring you back into ancient history and the Romans and their interactions with Druids, of course, in England, you have the figure of Boudicca, who's a massive figure of course, at that time, too, I presume. Is there also a sense, maybe in England with the Druids? I mean, was there a sense of them being kind of these resistance symbols alongside figures like Boudicca against the Romans 2000 years ago? Or is that a bit too far to look at?
- [22:27]
Professor Ronald Hutton
You can look exactly like that. And you'd be right. If you airbrush away the nastier accusations of the Romans, then you have a whole bundle of charming characteristics. The Druids are resistance leaders to imperial oppression and conquest. And the other side of them is that they are great leaders. They're supposed to be wise, they're supposed to be powerful, they're supposed to be green, because some of the later Roman writers said they particularly hung out in wild natural places like woods and caves. They might actually have done that hiding from Roman persecution. They're associated with oak trees in particular, especially if they have mistletoe growing on them. So they can be made into the ideal Georgian, English or British patriotic hero because they revere oak trees. And the Royal Navy is made of oak. They can be even made the patrons and founders the Royal Navy.
- [23:27]
Tristan Hughes
Now, the mistletoe link there is interesting because, yes, that is something you Think of, isn't it? But does that have its origins in the original Roman literature when talking about Druids?
- [23:37]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It absolutely has, but it has its origins in a few lines in one Roman writer. I mean, I say there's quite a lot of Greek and Roman testimony about druids, but you could watch the whole lot of it together, in fact, in about five to eight pages. And this guy is Pliny the Elder, great naturalist, and he's discussing trees and he discusses mistletoe and says that the tribes of southern France, well, he called it Gaul, were particularly excited about this. When it appears on an oak tree, we assume that these tribes had druids because they're in a Celtic speaking area. Pliny doesn't speak of druids here, but he says when they find a mistletoe tree, they go wild. Because as anybody who knows the countryside knows, it's mistletoe hardly ever grows on an oak tree. It's very rare. So when you find a mistletoe in ancient southern Gaul, you then cut the mistletoe on the sixth day after the next new moon. Nothing here about midwinter, nothing about Christmas that it is to be. And the priests, he doesn't call them druids, turn up with some white cattle for sacrifice, a golden sickle to cut the mistletoe, cut the mistletoe and it drops into a cloth to stop it hitting the ground. And the mistletoe can then be made into a very powerful medicine which heals anything.
- [25:03]
Tristan Hughes
Well, I must admit I think of panoramics in asterisks and obelix, first of all, I've got to get that on the table. But the sickle is another object that has come to define these druids too, hasn't it, Ronald?
- [25:14]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Entirely because of Pliny. Pliny is the only person to describe what priests of the Celtic peoples would have looked like. Although admittedly he's only describing their gear for one ceremony and he doesn't call them druids. But if you ignore all that, then we have a person in a white robe with a golden sickle and a bunch of mistletoe. Hey presto, you've got your custom made 18th to 20th century druid.
- [25:51]
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- [26:29]
Tristan Hughes
I hope you don't mind if we now go to Britain. And Britain back in ancient history with the Roman invasion and conquest, 1st century AD. So Caesar's gone now. Ronald, what do the sources tell us about the Druids and their involvement, I guess, in the resistance when the Romans decide to take over Britain?
- [26:50]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It's a few sentences in one paragraph in one book by one writer. I said, we don't have much to go on. He is the greatest single Roman historian, at least of the imperial era. He's Tacitus and he's writing about something that happened in Britain, allegedly when he was a boy. It's a generation before, but his father in law was the great Roman general Agricola, who ruled Britain and might have been an eyewitness of what he's describing or might not. He's talking about when a Roman army conquering westwards across Britain, reaches the end of Wales and faces the island of Anglesey, mon to Welsh, across a narrow but rather dangerous strait of water, the Menai. And what the Roman army sees is a native British army drawn up to fight them on the Anglesey shore. And among them things they've never seen before. That's the Roman soldiers, that is tall druids shouting curses and black robed women with flaming torches like Furies. The fact that the Romans have never seen Druids before doing this is kind of interesting. It seems to indicate they're not that ubiquitous. And of course, druid here might just be the handy term for a priest or a magician. And the soldiers are terrified by this. But up steps their square jawed, clean cut hero, Suetonius Paullinus, the Roman general and governor. And he says, what are you? You're supposed to be Romans and you're scared of the bunch of silly women. So go for it, lads. And the lads go for it. They cross the water, they defeat the enemy army, and then they find that this is justified because they find that the native groves and shrines are full of evidence for horrific human sacrifice. So it was all worth it anyway. So what's the problem? Well, the problem is that it's now accepted that Tacitus invented entire episodes in his histories and possibly entire characters. They're there to liven things up when the narrative's getting a bit dry and make points about the superiority of Roman civilization and eulogize certain heroes. And actually the narrative has been getting a bit dry at this point and Suddenly, this stunning image comes in. So you have three points on a spectrum again, and the choice is up to you. One is that Tacitus made the entire thing up because he knew his readership would love it. Second, that he got the story from a superannuated legionary in a wine bar in Rome and we don't know how reliable it was. Third, that this is an eyewitness account from Agricola himself or somebody else, a mate of Agricola who'd seen service with Suetonius Paulinus. So every word is objectively true. That's an enormously wide spectrum and we can't be sure of where we are, only of it.
- [30:11]
Tristan Hughes
It's also interesting, isn't it? I'd say if that's in Tacitus, but I did not realise that that was the only mention in Roman literature of Druids in Britain. Like, they're not associated with Julius Caesar in Britain or the initial Roman invasion with Aulus Plautius. It's only on the island of Anglesey that that word is used. And you've also highlighted how that word Druid, you know, kind of is used sometimes as a word for priest as well. So, yes, the evidence, as you say, it is extremely limited, isn't it? Or at least evidence we can say the word Druid is mentioned.
- [30:45]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Yeah. Welcome to a historical quagmire. And it might be said that Tacitus never says that Anglesey was a particularly Druidic island or a holy island instead, because it's offshore, it's the ideal place for resistance base, because the Romans have to struggle across a dangerous bit of water to get at you, so you can kind of hit them when they're drenched and seasick on the beach. Except, of course, it doesn't work.
- [31:15]
Tristan Hughes
Absolutely. And how has this particular story involving Druids, and because we've already talked about in passing, kind of the legacy of the Druids and how it evolves down, you know, into the last couple of centuries. How does this story affect, you know, kind of the development, the view of Anglesey over the centuries and millennia following? Is it. Does it become closely associated with Druids or seen as a holy isle?
- [31:40]
Professor Ronald Hutton
No kidding. Both. It becomes the Druidic isle par excellence in modern British culture.
- [31:47]
Tristan Hughes
And so how is that defined? I mean, that is a kind of a pilgrimage place. Is it?
- [31:52]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It is. And it's a neat package because it's got absolutely terrific prehistoric monuments from every age of prehistory back to the Neolithic. It has, indeed the finest prehistoric monuments in Wales. And so when you couple these with Druids, it makes for a very charismatic package. It's also relatively accessible down the A55 and the Britannia Bridge, and it's on the way to the Irish Ferry, the main London to Dublin link.
- [32:23]
Tristan Hughes
Oh, well, there you go. Well, you mentioned there how in Tacitus accounts, once they take the island, they notice evidence of human sacrifice. We talked about that a bit in passing already. But I want to ask, as we get later in the Roman period, do Roman writers, as the druids become the bogeymen, do they elaborate on the, I guess, rather horrifically the methods of human sacrifice that these Druids supposedly undertook?
- [32:50]
Professor Ronald Hutton
They don't elaborate as they go on. They elaborate near the beginning because a couple of our earliest writers, later than Caesar, but before Tacitus and Pliny, called Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, have sentences about the Druids. Now, both of these are working in the Mediterranean area, Strabo in the near east, so they never go near Druids. And both of them are also quite good at citing their sources. And unusually, neither of them cite the source material they use about Druids. So again, we have no idea where they got it from. Pliny is somebody who always footnotes his texts, but with the case of Druids, rather shiftily he says, ut dicatur, it is said, but it's pretty lurid. The modes of human sacrifice detailed in Strabo and Diodorus Siculus between them, and indeed echoing something from Caesar or pseudo Caesar, are that you burn people alive in big wicker work figures. This is where we get the Wicker man from.
- [34:09]
Tristan Hughes
That was it, right?
- [34:10]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Walk on. Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. But also, don't try this at home, folks. You divine the future by stabbing a human victim in the stomach so they die slowly and then observing the movements their body makes, like a kind of semaphore as they're writhing to death.
- [34:30]
Tristan Hughes
Goodness. I mean, I don't really want to ask is it true? Because it does feel like, you know, this is Roman labeling of the bogeyman and these horrific kind of execution stories with them. But maybe I can sugarcoat it a little by asking, archaeologically, is there evidence, potential evidence of human sacrifice in Britain, but probably maybe not. That refers to things like Wickerman and so on.
- [34:53]
Professor Ronald Hutton
No, you're not sugarcoating it. Things are still pretty grim. The answer is the same for any archaeological evidence connected to the Druids, that we have masses or we have none, depending on how you read it we get huge quantities of human bones around pre Roman French and British sites but they could be the remains of human sacrifices kept as trophies. They could be the remains of enemies killed in war and kept as trophies or they could be the remains of your own revered ancestors who are kept near you so that their spirits will linger and bless you and their bones retain something of their personalities in life. In the north of France there are enormous open air sanctuaries of the kind you don't get in Britain which have the bodies of large numbers of young men that were fixed up around the precincts or put into piles of bones. And again it seems quite likely that these are enemy warriors and having slaughtered them you then bring them back as trophies and you keep them around to reassure you trash to the other side before and you can do it again. Or it's just possible that they are your heroic dead that are brought to the sanctuaries as to war graves or cenotaphs and displayed there to encourage their successors. We have no testimony that can take us to one side or the other.
- [36:34]
Tristan Hughes
So once again it's this idea that let's say in Britain, yes there is seems to be evidence of human sacrifice from the archaeology but whether that has to do with Druids, that is another question entirely.
- [36:47]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Well it's worse than that. It's that we may have no evidence of human sacrifice from archaeology because it's also equivocal and if it is human sacrifice it could be connected to the Druids or not. We're still waist deep in mud at this point struggling to make a path through.
- [37:08]
Tristan Hughes
Foreign.
- [37:14]
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- [37:52]
Tristan Hughes
Well Ronald, I think we've covered all that we can with the ancient history and the Roman sources and, and archaeology. I guess the next question is when we go into the legacy and before we get to the, the the association now with the winter solstice and so on is you mentioned earlier how that other big source of literature which is from medieval Ireland and and Wales, this Christian literature, I mean how easy a transition is it from the Roman literature highlighting the Druids as these great bogeymen into that early medieval literature that we then see about the druids.
- [38:26]
Professor Ronald Hutton
There's no transition. The two are not connected. The Irish, when they became Christian, and to their huge delight, read the Roman pagan literature, which was to become an inheritance of Western civilization in general, thought, hey, we can match this, and began working up a tremendous native literature of their own featuring heroes in the same way as the Greek and the Roman mythology. And druids are a big part of that. The Welsh may or may not have any references to druids in their medieval literature. There are no clear references to druids as such in most of their medieval stories. There are a few passing references to a class of person called the Darewithong, who may be druids or they may not. It may be a word for a kind of ecstatic prophet. So we aren't sure. This is disputed. Whether there's any echo of ancient paganism in medieval Welsh literature is something that's now endlessly controversial. Once again, the truth is, we can't be sure. Either way could be right. The Irish literature, nobody doubts there's a lot of paganism in it, but here too, there's a big controversy over whether the paganism represented is a genuine memory or it's made up by medieval Christian writers.
- [40:01]
Tristan Hughes
Is it interesting that with that Irish literature, you know, these heroes and associations with druids at a time that Christianity is there, that the druids, dare I say, kind of brought in to Christianity in Ireland?
- [40:16]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Yes. Like the Romans and Greeks, medieval Christian Irish writers found two different uses for druids. Most of the time they are evil pagan priests and their whole function in the stories is to get trashed by Christian saints.
- [40:33]
Tristan Hughes
St. Patrick. Is St. Patrick someone who fights a druid, or am I? I think I'm right in that. Is it?
- [40:39]
Professor Ronald Hutton
You're absolutely spot on.
- [40:40]
Tristan Hughes
There we go.
- [40:41]
Professor Ronald Hutton
He is chronologically the first of the saints to take on druids, at least in the mythology hagiography. Yes, he takes on the evil druids of King Leary, the king of Ireland, and of course, he defeats them and destroys some of them. This could be an actual memory of how Christianity came into Ireland, but it bears a suspicious resemblance to the account of the contest of Moses and Aaron and the wicked priests of Pharaoh in the Old Testament.
- [41:16]
Tristan Hughes
It's so interesting once again, and as we've already covered in this chat, you know how the druid, the name, the word, evolves over those centuries and millennia and going from ancient times to medieval Ireland and, you know, Georgian Britain and even now into the 20th and 21st centuries. Ronald. I mean, the word Druid is so popular today, hence why we're doing an episode all about it. But what legacy do the Druids have today?
- [41:43]
Professor Ronald Hutton
The Druids have an immense legacy and have had since the 17th century in that they're so good to think with because of these incredibly vivid and yet contrasting images provided by the ancient writers and the Irish. So if you want heroic ancestors, the Druids are tailor made, being patriotic, brave, green and wise. If you want to condemn the ancient world, at least the non civilized, non Christian bits of it, as the kind of thing we grew out of then, they are the epitome of the nastiest kind of pagan priest. And so at the present day, they still do the same thing. I still read novels or even missionary work by evangelical Christians holding up the Druids as exemplars of what paganism does if you allow it to survive or revive. But also, we have a pagan revival in this nation, and Druidry plays a very important part in that. Representing a nature based, very green spirituality and a pacifist one, as well as one that celebrates the land on which we live. You can take the Druids almost anywhere, but because they're such charismatic figures in the world and national imagination, they're wonderful figures with whom to work, you know.
- [43:14]
Tristan Hughes
That celebration of the land brings me wonderfully onto my last question, which is of course about the winter solstice and famous stone circles and prehistoric sites, and the most famous obviously being Stonehenge. How do the Druids come to be associated with great monuments like that and the winter solstice?
- [43:33]
Professor Ronald Hutton
There are two different associations with different points. The association of the Druids with Stonehenge and prehistoric monuments begins in Scotland in the 16th century and becomes universal in the 18th century. And it's simply because in that period, the peoples of Europe realized they have this tremendous heritage of prehistoric monuments. They hadn't really considered them before, and now they start mapping and drawing and investigating them on a big scale. The Druids are the priests that you encounter at the beginning of history. So it's a natural assumption that the druids built these monuments. The guy who really nails this and makes Druids national stars for the next 200 years is the founder of field archaeology. He's William Stukeley, an 18th century doctor who becomes a clergyman. And he makes us a very big service because by a mixture of superb fieldwork and some excavation, he proves that monuments like Stonehenge were not built by the Romans, by the wizard Merlin, by the Vikings or the Anglo Saxons, but by the prehistoric British. And he's spot on. Whether or not the Druids built them is forever wide open, because we now realize that prehistory went on for thousands of years longer than Stukeley and his contemporaries did. And there were a lot of big changes in the nature of monuments and religion in that time. So the Druids may simply have been the latest, the Iron Age version of that. On the other hand, they could have been around since the old Stone Age. We just don't know. The link to the winter solstice is through Pliny, right? The British don't start using mistletoe as a common decoration at Christmas until the 18th century, and we don't start kissing under it until the late 18th century. But once we start doing that and don't do any research, the impulse to think this must be an ancient fertility rite. It begins in London kitchens in the late 18th century. But once you get to the Victorian period, that's forgotten. And to look up your Pliny and pin it on the Druids is irresistible. But the good news here is there's absolutely no doubt that the Druids will have celebrated midwinter, because the solstices, midwinter, Midsummer, are enormous festivals all over Europe, especially northern Europe, as soon as you come to history. So since everybody else celebrated midwinter big time, the Druids would definitely have done it.
- [46:28]
Tristan Hughes
Well, I also love the fact that we can also end with another association with Pliny the Elder. Such a fascinating source. And this has been a brilliant chat, Ronald, all about the Druids. You've done books on the Druids in the past, and they are cooled the.
- [46:43]
Professor Ronald Hutton
Druids unimaginatively and more imaginatively. The bigger one is Blood and Mistletoe. The Druids was a pop book for people who wanted a quick hit. And Blood and Mistletoe has the full story with all the source references.
- [47:01]
Tristan Hughes
Well, fantastic, Ronald. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to come on the podcast today.
- [47:07]
Professor Ronald Hutton
It's been a huge pleasure, Tristan.
- [47:11]
Tristan Hughes
Well, there you go. There was Professor Ronald Hutton talking all things the Druids. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to it. Please follow the Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. Don't forget, you can also listen to us. And all of history hits podcasts. Ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe that's enough from me. I will see you in the next episode and I wish you a very Merry Christmas.
- [47:52]
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